Please, Please, Please

Kompakt; 2007

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Judging by how long it takes a Tobias Thomas mix to get up and running, you'd expect him to be more tortoise than man; it's a good 10 minutes and three scratchy ambient tracks before Thomas drops the beat on Please ,Please, Please, his third mix disc for Kompakt. Actually, it might be longer, since I'm not sure if "vinyl crackle plus bass pulse" really counts as a beat. Thomas' extended intros are nearly all atmosphere and ambient drift because he's serving notice on anyone who comes to his mixes looking for a little Saturday night fever. Thomas is keenly aware that a mix CD should operate on its own-- in this case more intimate-- terms. Please, Please, Please is an object made by one friend for another, rather than by a DJ looking to make 1,000 friends on the dancefloor.

Thomas gets so intimate, in fact, that he almost climbs into your inner ear. The opening of PPP takes the deliquescing church bells of Pantha Du Prince's "Butterfly Girl (Pantha Lost the Beat Version)" and the freefalling piano chords of Adolf "DJ Koze" Noise's "Was Ist Zuviel Zeit? (Dub)" and slides them across the big black headspace a good pair of headphones can create. His taste in beats tends towards the timbral/melodic as well; it's five tracks and a good 20 minutes before the recognizably jacking house boom-tick of Johannes Heil's "Aquarius" finally pokes its head above the surface of Thomas' aqueous mix, rippling like a lake under moonlight. The first half of PPP sounds like it should only be played around 4 a.m. at just-audible volume.

As PPP progresses, starting with the starved tribal house bongos and emaciated handclaps of Ricardo Villalobos' "The Contempt (Trip Tollsmix)" at the halfway mark, it picks up the pace with a string of beefy, if ultimately interchangeable, mid-tempo bangers, a slight capitulation to the fact that Thomas is supposed to be making a "dance" mix. This muscular middle peaks with the Detroit techno hi-hats and bouncy ball electro bassline of Reinhard Voigt's "Suchtkultur". And then, after an almost entirely instrumental hour, a charming (if cheesy) vocoder-hiccup cover of the Smiths' "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" by Brant featuring Mr. Roper sets up two leftfield diva tunes to close us out.

The baby's rattle electro beats of International Pony's "Gravity" are strung between tingly cartoon harp runs and keyboard trills coated with major label gloss, as the Pony playfully pitches up the kittenish female singer until she's as screechy as that Dan Deacon album. Thomas and Geiger's own remix of Stella's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" (follow all that?) mixes up live instruments (you can hear the frets squeaking), competent vocals (though hardly Nicks-ian), and a spacey New Order breakdown that then ditches the electric bass and jazzy drums for a spot-on early '90s techno pastiche. Like the rest of PPP, ultimately less of a state-of-the-nation dance mix than an idiosyncratic diversion, its inclusion is a sign that, though Thomas' mixing skills mean the disc flows smoothly, his ear for selection remains tuned to a very private channel.